Stuff Brock Says

Brock's verbal skills have been constantly exploding. It's dizzying trying to keep track of all the bloggable stuff he does, and as he gets more active, I constantly feel like I'm slipping further behind. In a small attempt to keep up, I've been sending myself some short emails when he says something funny. It's time to dig through the backlog, while Brock digs through the log....

2/23: OK, I promise we'll get back to the logs, but this one needs a picture. Brock likes us to draw whatever comes into his mind. This day, it was a mommy spy camera with hands holding a yo-yo and eating cheese. I labeled the spy-cam "mom" in an attempt to work on reading with Brock. He knows the sounds that each letter make, but he can't quite grok how the sounds come together into words, so he resorts to guessing. Here's Brock sounding out mom: "mmmmmmm.....aaaahhhhhhhhh....mmmmmmm....CHEESE!" "No it doesn't say cheese. Try again." "mmmmmmm.....aaaahhhhhhhhh....mmmmmmm....SPY CAMERA!"

We're working on it.

3/1: Brock came into the bathroom while I was pooping and proceeded to start unrolling all the toilet paper. 

"Brock! Stop. That's not funny."

Brock smiling, "It's half-funny."

3/3: Brock plays a game where he declares that some object is driving some other object then he laughs. It started with things like, "a car driving a truck!" Then he says, "that's crazy," and laughs a lot. Brock is pretty creative and it quickly devolved into such knee-slappers as, "a cloud driving a building," "a tree driving a daddy," and my favorite: "an apple driving an astronaut." 

3/8: This is about when Brock was first starting to try and interact with other kids. He was at the park sitting on the airplane structure trying to get other kids to join him. He just yelled, "baby come on the plane," to everyone. One kid about his age randomly obliged. I'm pretty sure he didn't hear Brock, but Brock immediately attempted a conversation. "How's it going with you? I'm good!" Lot's of silence from the other kid. Not much later, Brock decided he'd had enough of the mute. "I want the airplane clear now. Baby go!" I explained to Brock that just as he could invite other kids, but it was their choice to join, he could also ask them to leave, but it was still ultimately their choice. Brock calmly leaned over to the other kid, pointed his finger in the kid's face and said, "Leave. It's YOUR choice."

Later that day, Brock and I were sitting on the back patio enjoying a nice day and a moment of silence. Out of nowhere he spoke up. "Daddy, do you like selling cows?"

3/11:  After an enormous overnight poop: "Daddy, did you have a good time changing my diaper?"

3/13: "Daddy, do you like spicy pizza?" 

"I do."

"Daddy, do you like spicy mamas?"

3/28: "On little day, Brock will be smaller." Not sure what that one means.

"You can walk around, and I can walk around, but daddy, there are some kids that can't walk around." I'm hoping that Brock is just referring to crawlers here. It was a weird day.

3/29: We've fallen victim to food bargaining with Brock. Holly had just made an amazing carrot cake for Easter and Brock was locked in on getting some. He woke up from his nap and this was the very first thing he said: "If I eat ten bites of meat, I get cake!"

"No Brock. It doesn't work like that. You can have meat for lunch though."

"I eat ten bites of strawberries, I get CAKE!"

"No Brock, but you can have all the strawberries you like." Then I showed a crack in my armor. "I tell you what Brock, eat ten bites of vegetables and you can have some cake."

"Carrot is a vegetable!!! I eat ten bites of cake, I get more cake!!!!"

Can't fault the logic.

4/13: Brock likes to make messes happen in his imagination. It usually involves water getting everywhere, especially all over our heads. On this day, he got considerably more morbid. "...and then the milk went all over daddy, and it washed daddy's blood out, and then daddy's blood went all over the floor everywhere, and then the rest of the blood went in daddy's mouth."  This was accompanied by some frenzied and adorable hand motions, so I just let it go.

4/16: Brock complains constantly about a clicking noise that bothers him while he sleeps. We still haven't solved the mystery. It could be his monitor switching to night-vision, the baby-gate to downstairs, or perhaps us flicking light switches. At this point the baby-gate was the lead suspect. Brock gave me some pointers as I put him down to sleep. "Daddy, I don't like the clicking noise."

"I know Brock."

"It's OK daddy. You'll work on it."

"I will."

"Murray's mommy and daddy don't go up and down the stairs while he sleeps. So Murray never has to hear the click."

And just like that, Brock mastered being passive-agressive.

4/26: Until about this week, Brock hated to pretend he was something else. "No. I'm just a Brock," was the standard response. Now Brock is never Brock. We are always penguins or squids or flies. When we play baseball, we are foxes, which leads me to one of Brock's cutest repeated phrases: "I'm a fox that plays baseball!" Then he swings for the fences...

4/27:  Brock still gets treats for successful potty usage, especially poos. His current favs are gummis in the shape of Hello Kitty. The best part is that he makes the gummis talk while he eats them. "I think I'm going to go in your tummy and look for the rest of me... No. I think I'll wait till you get back. I'll wait till you turn into a poopoo and Brock gets another one of me."

4/27: Alright, I ran out of log pics. Here's Brock still excited to disc before we found logland. This last story is about how Brock can apparently learn from videos. Brock loves to categorize. He's constantly checking things right ("a pigeon is a kind of bird") and wrong ("a pineapple is a kind of apple"). This day he started by stating/asking, "a dolphin is a kind of fish." I told him no, and began explaining how fish breathe water and mammals have to surface for air, meaning dolphins are mammals much like whales. This explanation upset Brock, and he let me know, "But the Octonauts said that the whale shark is a fish! The largest fish!" 

Ah naming conventions. Why oh why does the largest fish's name start with "whale"? We're pretty sure he gets the distinction now, but we're dead sure he'll always be ready to correct us.